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The Myth of Renewable Energy
Harperdog writes to this "Excellent piece by Dawn Stover about what renewables can and can't do. The sun and wind may be practically inexhaustible, but 'renewable' energy isn't. Solar, wind, and geothermal power are not fundamentally different from other energy technologies that consume finite natural resources. Good reading for anyone who thinks they know how to combat climate change."
Renewable doesnt mean infinite.
Jose T Oliveira Jr.
Claiming solar power isn't renewable because it requires water, you do realize the water used returns back to the earth once it is used right? That water is also renewable (as long as you don't pollute it while using it, you can use it forever). Will it maybe take 10% of the power generated to transport water, sure.. but that leaves us with 90% gains and full renew ability.
I'm not even going to bother refuted this ultra netcase's other bits, there is something mentally off with this idiot.
Did you know that things like coal and oil came from the capture and processing of Photons, just like wind/PV/hydro does?
Coal/Oil only seems cheap on a photon processed basis because Man didn't spend the effort and time converting biomass into the coal/oil.
Only have one child.
The author, by failing to mention the current oil-based energy strategy at all, while vilifying the alternative energy sources leaves the reader with a sense of, "the alternatives are bad, lets keep using the current infra until we come up with something better." Interestingly, nuclear energy is *not* mentioned either, positive or negative - it's completely omitted.
I'd not be surprised if the author was either a shill for the oil and gas companies or the nuclear energy affiliates.
It's really time to go metric guys, unless anyone can explain to me what that means?
So does drought and famine. Some parts of the world would likely become more habitable than they are now, but others would have water shortages and resulting famine.
But, then again, you're trolling so I doubt that it's going to make a difference.
There is a pretty awesome "new technology", and it was discovered a few thousand years ago -- it's called "humans not reproducing at a disgustingly unsustainable pace with the apparent goal of destroying the world as quickly as possible."
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Can't see any agenda there...
She doesn't exactly cover herself in glory for facts, either. She doesn't appear to know what neodynium is used for (why, exactly, would you want magnets in a gearbox?). She (quite deliberately, I think) confuses consumable fuels with non-consumable equipment - a turbine may need 800 pounds of neodynium, but after 20 years of operation you've still got 800 pounds of neodynium. In fact the whole magnet is reusable as is. Today's largest wind machines are 10MW (in construction, anyway). 4.5 million of them would (on average, not peak capacity) provide the entire world's energy use - not sure where her need for an additional ~2 billion devices comes from.
Of course it's not infinite - nothing is (probably) but that's not really the claim, is it? The only sensible point made is that renewable sources require materials that are finite, but I think we knew that already.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
The solution to the water energy problem is more energy, because energy can be used to get water. This, however, lowers the Life Cycle Output of the energy system. LCO or LCA is the expected usable energy out, divided by the expected usable energy used to create and run a system. So if a system produces 10 watts for every watt it takes to build, run, and dispose of it, then its LCA is 10. The 20th century got by on a miracle: namely petroleum has a high LCA, and its its own storage mechanism. Gasoline has great power to weight storage capacities with internal combustion. And internal combustion engines can be built of very cheap metals. There are many quandaries in replacing hydro-carbon energy, and the water energy trade off that the piece mentions is one of them, but it is one of scale. Once there is a large enough renewable base, then the low LCA that getting the water to run it has, is not a problem. It is at the beginning, when the return is eaten through by the water problem, because there are competing uses for water that have much higher economic returns in the short run, such as airconditioning and agriculture. None of these uses want to pay much higher rates for water so that people not yet born can have the advantages.
Where the article falls down is pressing an agenda, and making sloppy equivalences. The first is equating capital requirements with expendable requirements: we don't burn the rare earths we use in kinetic energy extraction – that is water, wind, and geothermal – and in fact, rare earths, are not, as a percentage of the earth's crust, all that rare. For example, wikipedia has this chart. It shows that all of the Lanthanide rare earths, plus scandium and yttrium, are more common than either gold or silver, many are more common than tin, and some more common than lead. The problem with them is that they tend to be found near the Actinide rare earths, particularly Thorium. If you have seen a press for "Thorium reactors" it is because exploitation of rare earths leads to Thorium by product, and reactors which burn it would be fantastically profitable, for the people who sell the rare earths. In reality, they have the same problems, only more so, of actively cooled salt reactors. Namely, they work until they blow up. The Chinese dump their Thorium in a holding lack, which, should it break, would contaminate large areas of land and volumes of water.
Side note: how is it that a browser's spell check doesn't know Actinide?
But for all of that, rare earths are not burned, the way for example Lithuium is not burned in a battery and can be recycled. These are recyclable, which is different from consumable. Hence moving from consumption of hydrocarbons, which really are burned, to using rare earths in capital energy, is a positive step, and while the author of the paper implies that there would be rare earth shortages, the reality is that this is not the case, and substitutes in the form of ceramics and active magnets (See Rare Earth Prices Plunge as Manufacturers turn to substitutes
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Coals plants also need to be built, they also need generators that require rare earth elements, they also need plenty of steel and concrete. And not only do they obviously spew shitloads of CO2, you also need to build the roads, railways or ships and ports to carry the coal around, as well as mine the damn thing.
So what is the argument? That since it's just merely much better, and not simply perfect, we should just give up on them?
Solar cells are potentially made from carbon :
graphene - http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/carbon-based-solar-cells/
or carbon nanotubes - http://www.bitsofscience.org/solar-cell-carbon-nano-energy-3418/
http://inhabitat.com/carbon-nanotubes-could-create-better-solar-cells/
The other technologies like wind turbines and those steaming solutions are just alternative green solutions to solar cells that are often cheaper. When the solar cells are going to continue to get cheaper like they are and no new alternative pops out, then they will probably be the prefferable choice of green energy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/20/solar-panel-price-drop
Their co-existence with new ways of storing electricity would make them even more practical.
New cheaper ways for making hydrogen:
http://www.gizmag.com/fukai-hydrogen-extraction-process/16674/
or carbon based supercapacitors?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512150731.htm
My point is, that there are actually new advancements in every horizon, which make this article a bit outdated.
"It has the smallest impact" ???
Fukushima and Tchernobyl come to mind of course. Do you realize that making an area like (40 miles)^2 unusable amounts to not a small cost on the economic point of view, or ruining the lives of 10'000's of displaced people is not a small nuisance?
Presently nuclear energy is the energy method having the largest impact in the far future (~100'000 years), as the nuclear wastes will require to be watched for a long time. Do you realize that such a timespan is comparable to the total time homo sapiens existed on Earth? (The salary of a single engineer over 100'000 yr corresponds already to the total building cost of a nuclear plant).
Can you imagine what will happen when the next global war occurs? And it will occur well before a century for sure. Each nuclear power plant will be an easy target, at the least a serious menace for those countries foolish enough to have forgot how stupid and nasty human beings may be.
The point is that the whole shameful article is a cesspit of incorrect arguments, and that the author either has no knowledge in the field at all, or is biased - most probably both.
- Photovolatic: the most important component of photovoltaic panels is silicon. It's one of the more abundant elements on earth. One can cover all landmass on earth with photovoltaics and still not run out. There are dopants in there that are less abundant, but only small quantities of them are required. Also, organic (as in carbon-based) photovoltaics are on the rise, which don't need said dopants. Also, at the end of the lifetime of a silicon-based panel, the silicon and dopants get recycled - they are way to valuable to throw away.
- Thermal solar energy and geothermal power: (cooling) water requirement is equivalent to current thermal technologies (nuclear, coal, gas,...). Also, in the case of geothermal, one could make a closed-cycle plant; this would work especially well in colder climates.
- Wind power: all electrical generators (except photovoltaic) contain magnets, so the argument goes agaist conventional energy as well. Also, the term "rare earths" is historical - we now know they are not really rare in the earth's crust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust
For instance, Neodynium is more abundant than for instance lead and tin. The problem with it is that it's hard to purify from natural deposits, so the annual supply is limited. Luckily, permanent magnets can be made from all kind of other materials, including abundantly available ones. The resulting generators will be somewhat heavier and less efficient, so it's currently cost-effective to use Neodynium, but if the price goes up, the industry will just switch to something else. Finally, these magnets are not consumed, they can be (and are) recycled or even reused in their original form.
- Biomass: this is not my personal favorite, but even so, the article is overly gloomy about it. The surface used for biomass is not lost forever - it can readily be re-purposed for agriculture once it's needed (or better energy-producing technologies become available). Also, a lot of agricultural land is being used for growing animal fodder, which is quite a wasteful business; if we would just stop eating those excessive amounts of meat that are a contributing factor to the current heart disease epidemic and eat a bit more vegetable protein sources, we could easily feed ourselves from half as much farmland (and still get more than enough meat to eat for a healthy and enjoyable diet). Also, at some point, technology might become available to grow excellent animal-free meat in bioreactors, which would make meat production way more efficient.
- Hydropower: just like silicon, the supply of concrete and steel is nearly inexhaustible. Yes, CO2 is emitted during the production thereof, but it's a tiny fraction of the CO2 that would be emitted when matching the lifetime energy production of the dam using fossil fuels. Also, building nuclear power plants also requires large quantities of concrete and steel (and given the current safety debate, they're still not using enough).
I'm sure there's more fallacies to be found in the article, but again, the point is that the author is either a nitwit or terribly biased (presumably both).